Wednesday, July 02, 2008

How Can We Call Ourselves Civilized?

How can we call ourselves civilized when no one came to the aid of the dying woman? A civilized society is one that regards the least of all people as worthy as the one who is high and mighty. That video shows how callous this society is when it comes to helping the least of all.______________________________________________-Hospital video shows no one helped dying womanBY JOHN MARZULLI

A shocking video shows a woman dying on the floor in the psych ward at Kings County Hospital, while people around her, including a security guard, did nothing to help.After an hour, another mental patient finally got the attention of the indifferent hospital workers, according to the tape, obtained by the Daily News.Worse still, the surveillance tape suggests hospital staff may have falsified medical charts to cover the utter lack of treatment provided Esmin Green before she died.

"Thank God for the videotape because no one would have believed this could have happened," said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union."There's a clear possibility of criminal wrongdoing with regard to recordkeeping, and that has to be investigated."The city Department of Investigation is part of a sweeping probe that has brought some changes to the ward known as G Building.A federal suit filed last year in Brooklyn alleged neglect and abuse of mental patients at the hospital. The suit sparked an investigation by the Brooklyn U.S. attorney's civil rights unit before the June 19 death.Two different security guards spotted Green, a native of the island of Jamaica, prone on the floor and did nothing, the tape shows. They have been fired, along with four other staffers.Green, 49, taken to the unit for "agitation," keels over out of her chair at 5:32a.m., according to the time stamp on the video. She had been sitting about 3feet from an observation window. Two other patients were in the room.Green is lying facedown on the floor, her legs splayed, when a security guard strolls by at 5:53 a.m., looks at her for about 20 seconds and then walks away.She is writhing on the floor, thrashing her legs, about 6 a.m., when her medical chart contends she was "awake, up and about, went to the bathroom."Green rolls on her back at 6:04a.m. She stops moving at 6:08 a.m., but two minutes later a security guard pushed his chair into camera view.He never gets out of the chair, but looks at Green and scoots away. A female patient who was in and out of the room finally brings a clinic staffer to check the woman and a crash cart is summoned.The medical chart claims she was "sitting quietly in [the] waiting room" at 6:20 a.m., although she was already dead. The cause of death is still under investigation."We are shocked and distressed by this situation," the Health and Hospitals Corp. said in a statement.